One of the greatest heists of all time occurred over the weekend and if you weren’t paying attention, you might have missed it.

baby-flips-birdIn one big “F*** You!” to the rest of the web, Digg instantly stole millions of links from across the web.

Instead of acting like a responsible URL shortener, Digg decided to redirect all the shortened links they control, to the corresponding Digg story instead of the target site, even if you aren’t logged in to Digg!

The problem with the setting was that it didn’t scale and even if we rebuilt it, the feature was blunt. It was confusing and caused a sense of inconsistency. We felt we could do much better.

I still don’t understand where they’re getting that the feature was confusing or caused a sense of inconsistency from. If you used it, you saw every tweet from the people you follow. That seems pretty simple to me.Update: Due to the uproar over the “small settings update” Twitter has published a new blog post saying:

The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt—it wouldn’t have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever.

In other words, , “Remember how we told you we killed the option because it was undesirable and confusing”? Well really we had to kill it off because we don’t have enough resources to run our service.”

Google just updated the guidelines that all AdSense publishers must abide by… but somebody had better tell the AdWords team.

Now, Google is obviously well within their rights to set whatever kind of guidelines they want, it’d just be nice if they bothered to adhere to them as well.

While Google is more than happy to charge advertisers for AdWords placement they apparently don’t want their publishers to have anything to do with sites on topics such as the “sale of prescription drugs”:

Update: Joel Comm (who had been out of town) responded to this post and the numerous retweets (thanks again to everyone who helped!) by killing the frame and keeping the rest of the features that make TwitPwr a an interesting URL shortener. Joel stated that the frame isn’t

“the primary purpose of Twitpwr and not an important feature to me. I instructed our dev to remove.” and “thanks for pointing it out.”

Joel, you’re more than welcome. I appreciate the quick response and hopefully the trend of sites like Digg and TwitPwr accommodating content publisher’s rights will continue.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce TwitPwr.com.

As you can see in the image above, the site is yet another URL shortening “service” that frames other sites’ content.

I’ve written fairlyextensively recently about the evils of this practice (known as framejacking) so I’m not going to rehash all those points here. But just so we’re all clear, framing another site’s content without the owner’s permission, is theft.

So, when I stumbled across TwitPwr today I was shocked. Not because another site was framejacking, but because the site is owned and operated by well known internet marketer Joel Comm!

In covering the Diggbar controversy I’ve been confronted several times with the question of “What’s the big deal?” or even that only SEO’s care about it.

While there are certainly SEO concerns, content producers (read as bloggers, podcast producers, video producers, artists, and just about anyone with a website) across the web should be up in arms whether they care about SEO or not. Why? Because at the heart of this issue is one small question with some BIG implications…

Who owns the content?

To illustrate my point, look at the image I’ve created below:

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, that’s 5, count them 5 layers of framing on top of the content’s source!

Update: Digg implemented changes earlier this week which drastically improves the Diggbar. Users who are not logged in to Digg (most importantly search engines) will no longer see the Diggbar, they will instead encounter a 301 redirect which is the SEO friendly way to redirect pages.

Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com does a videocast called Diggnation and just a couple weeks back he discovered that someone was framing HIS content. His reaction?

In light of the much publicized release of the Diggbar, which essentially places a Digg frame around your content, the discussion beginning at the 32 minute would seem to be a bit embarrassing for the Digg founder.